Worldmakings & Worldendings:
An Alternative Geology of The World

Instructor: Alexandra Mason and guests Date & Time: Saturday, October 20, 27, November 3, 10, January 5, 12, 19, 26 2 PM - 4:30 PM EST

DESCRIPTION Numerous universes might have been botched and bungled throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost, many fruitless trials made, and a slow but continual improvement carried out during infinite ages in the art of world-making” – David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Building upon ANON’s Altwoke Manifesto, as well as their previous seminar Collapse & Reconfiguration, this seminar will explore the conflation of the world as the map with the Earth as its territory by focusing on how similarities and differences between geology and geography have contributed to such conflation. Geology, as is it is typically defined, is the science of dynamic processes and the physical history of the Earth. A contemporary use of the Greek word eidos is in the phrase “eidetic memory,” which is the clinical term for photographic memory. The original greek root eidos was used by Aristotle in his articulation of metaphysics, eidos denoted the form of a thing as distinct from the matter of the thing. Another sense in which we can understand this dichotomy is in Spinoza’s metaphysical division between ‘extension’ and ‘thought’.

In the first module of this seminar, participants will expand the notion of geology to explore how material, social, and economic processes converge into The World, an auxiliary ecosystem of matter and paradigms within the Earth. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s method of nomadic thought, this seminar will move across disciplines such as epigenetics, multidimensional psychology, linguistics, and mysticism to trace the processes which provide the structural components of the World over time, symmetrical to the Earth’s development. The World’s genesis begins with the universe’s intelligibility as a cognitive map for human subjects.

Turning worldmaking inside out requires us to think rigorously about the notion of narrative in relation to the impact of our cognitive-behavioral assumptions, and their implications. Using this as a starting point, in the second module, we will employ a transdisciplinary approach to the history of rituals to understand how superstition operates in politics and economy, and the ways in which semantic content and material extensions complement one another. The second module also explores the political implications of apocalypse, in both its paradigmatic and common biblical dimension. Participants will learn about cataclysms and how it can be bootstrapped for the cultivation of new growth.

Image: Ben Willikens, Leipzig firmament, acrylic on aluminum, 2014

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